Tag: difficulty

Submitting is Difficult

If that title brings to mind pictures of a preacher holding forth on the finer points of Ephesians 5…let’s reel that imagination back towards something that makes sense in an author blog:

Submitting to literary agents is difficult.

The difficulty is not in following agency prescription lists: query letter, cover letter, first three chapters, any three chapters, first 10 pages, first 50 pages, platform elements, writing experience, how you heard about us, brief selling points, sales handles, back cover copy… no. The difficulty is elsewhere. 

The difficulty is in the waiting. 

More so than even, I would say, in the rejection. The rejection is expected. I’ve accumulated dozens of rejection letters already in my brief non-career. Each one closes one door. One door that no longer requires my attention.

This week I’m blogging for the other aspiring authors out there. (Don’t they say everyone’s got a book in them?) Expect here no expert advice—that’s out there and necessary! appreciated! But I’ll be content for this to serve merely a breath of air. Think of my words as thoughts from someone just a step or two ahead on the publishing path. Thoughts from, Other Writer, someone possibly every bit as green as you are.

The submission process is looooooooooooooooooong.

Prepare yourself. If you are going to try getting a book published as a nobody, it is going to require a lot of your spare time (or sleep time) and a lot of patience.

Nor should you make the mistake of thinking self-publishing is the easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy shortcut to your dreams. You could pay others to do all the self-publishing steps for you (and put your project in a financial hole thousands of dollars deeper than sales of your book will likely ever match) or you could do all the work of educating yourself about layout, cover design, spine thickness, paper thickness, paper color, fonts, ISBN’s, e-pubs, PDFs, kindle formatting, registering a self-owned publishing company, on and on. Or you could hold your breath until mysterious, publishing-savvy new friends fall out of trees and do everything exactly like you like it for free (which has got to be the least reliable of the three).

I, myself, am not self-publishing, though many who ask, “can I read your book, yet?” ask why not.

Because.

I stuck my toe in the waters of traditional publishing, then slipped my whole cold self into these inky waters, so I can wait. Float here for a bit. Just how many times do you think I will get the chance to write and attempt to publish my first book?†

I know the odds are against me.

I might prune completely and still have nobody notice me floating here.

I’m still gonna try.

Back in January and February, I hired a company to make my submissions for me, and through them I queried 25-30 agents/agencies per month. That company’s services weren’t cheap, but I do credit them with showing me how it was done and getting me started, which is nothing to sneeze at. I call those mad days my “shotgun” submissions.

These days I’m selecting my own submission targets, calling these my “rifle” submissions since I research, rank, and particularly choose each agency/agent. Last week I queried three, which some experts say is quite enough at one time. For, should a full manuscript be requested, it’s very possible a several-weeks’-long period of “exclusivity” will be required as well, in which I’d be bound to not give the manuscript to anyone else. 

Which seems a little like—if the logic indeed is to move me towards avoiding too many agents asking for my manuscript all at once—insisting we throw in just one fishing line instead of a dozen, plus a net and a stick of dynamite, when everyone knows the lake was all but emptied of fish years ago.

But such is the prevailing logic, I guess, so other than last week’s three and Jan-Feb’s shotgunners, there’s only been one other agent I’ve queried so far. I wrote her back in May, and the 8-week wait-window has just ended. Now, an agent can always reply after that window has closed, but when the website says, “You can assume after 8 weeks that we’re not interested in your project,” it doesn’t give a realist much reason to hope.

Plus, it was hard enough checking email during those 8 weeks—who needs to pile on the additional annoyance of nursing hope beyond the 8 weeks? Though I guess I’ve just now given myself three fresh reasons for barely-hopeful checking each morning, haven’t I? Just this morning there was an email with “Submission” as the subject line.

It was a soliloquy on Ephesians 5.

Kidding.

It was a rejection letter. A form letter, as most of them are. A leftover from my February shotgun submissions.

I wish everyone would send a rejection letter, though. It’s far easier to bolt a door shut than to, day after day, have your mind’s periphery jump at every squeak, every shaft of light, and forever be wondering if someone’s on the other side of that door about to push it open…

If I’ve learned one surprising thing on this journey, it’s that publishing books is about many things before it is about great writing. Of course compelling writing is fantastic, but it’s far from a necessity. Only one criterion makes it into that category:

Sales.

If an agent can’t see “$$” when they look at your book, it frankly doesn’t matter how well it’s written. Agents weed through endless slush piles seeking the one or two or twenty manuscripts this week or month or year that might have a chance of selling well. Granted, that slush pile is largely garbage, or a few inches north of that, but it contains a lot of excellent writing that will never float its way to the top, either.

Rest assured, however, my certitude (just like absolutely every single author out there) that my own writing is not part of the garbage is unshakeable. Which makes me a little shaky. For I’ve read too many embarrassments who are convinced that poor writing comes only from “other writers, never me.”

But what if I’ve become one of “those” people? Reassuringly, just the fact that I asked made me feel better. I don’t think “those” people ever ask.

Anyway…so after an agent contracts with an author to represent their work, (s)he pitches it to (a) publisher(s). I recently read that some publishers publish 1 out of every 1,000 books they’re pitched.

And out of every 10 books that do get published, 9 will cost (lose) the publisher money.

So everyone’s on a mad search for that blockbuster which can make up for all the lost ground. And it cracks me up how many new authors believe they’ve already written it.

Oh, but it’s only the rest of all them that are crazy! If only I could be discovered, they’d realize I really have written the next [The Shack, Harry Potter, whatever].

Hehehe.

The odds against an unknown, non-famous, regular, without-an-online-tribe writer getting published at all, let alone writing the latest bestseller, aren’t worth the mathematical effort it would take to calculate. Of course it happens; we’ve heard about it in the news. But there’s a reason (or rather, hundreds of thousands of reasons, a.k.a. writers) it’s news.

I’m still willing to be patient.

I can do some waiting.

Just not forever. 

Eventually, I will self-publish. Of course I will.

Because I have no idea if the book I’ve written is marketable or not. I don’t know if it’s unique or not. If it’s too similar to some other story that’s been seen before…it doesn’t stand a chance of being picked up. In fact, unless my query letter jumps—screaming, yelling, and carrying sacks of cash—off a computer screen and into the retinas of an agent (who am I kidding? it’ll be one of their assistants), almost every agency I query stands to read exactly zero of my manuscript. Many won’t make the end of the query letter. 

It’s a tough market. Countless writers more prolific and gifted than I have never broken in.

I still say to You, Aspiring Writer:

Write it anyway. 

That book inside you that has never stopped knocking at your mind’s door? That story that never stops nagging you to get it out of your head and down on paper?

Write it.

Go ahead and imagine the worst: that nary a soul beyond a few loved ones ever reads your book.

Still I say, write.

You’ll be glad you did.

I (non-published, unknown, unread, and unnoticed, too) wrote mine.

And I couldn’t be happier.

OK, a full-manuscript request from an agent would still jack the happiness levels out the roof, I admit.

But it isn’t a necessity.

 

 

 

†You were right to check, but it’s as you thought: one

Lily Was the Valley Excerpt: Screaming

No one told us about the screaming.

In the early stages, still filling out paperwork, I thought the hard part would be simply accomplishing this thing called adoption. But paperwork proved to be nothing to the war our daughter brought into the house. Struggle personified itself in the wiry body of a screaming girl who launched a campaign to take over our world.

I had taken no courses and done little reading. My realm had been the paperwork, and I plowed through it with due diligence and left the nurture stuff to my wife. I judged myself prepared—I was hardly a candidate for a class on how to be a dad; I was not in the “clueless new parent” category—but I was mistaken.

Nothing debilitates quite like being clueless about your own cluelessness. Somehow I missed the memo that adoption difficulties often stretch for years beyond finalization. Somehow I hadn’t learned that negligible touch and scant nurture in the first year of life can affect the human brain. I had never heard the words sensory, processing, and disorder together in one sentence. I’d had no reason to think about neurotransmitters or synapses since college biology. I had not one clue that the cerebral health of our new little family member might be something I should concern myself with.

Our difficulties with paperwork and waiting would fade to nostalgia.

I never dreamed there could be significant differences in rearing adopted versus biological children, but even once those differences had walloped me over the head, I was still ignorant about what to do about them. Doors onto life-giving adoptive theory were only opened to us years later when we got involved in our second adoption. Meanwhile, our first three months of adoptive life were difficult beyond expectation—exponentially so. Those three months got seared into memory. Having been a dad three times already counted for almost nothing.

The screams were bloodcurdling. Three hours, every night. I hear them still. They could start at seven and finish at ten, or start at nine and finish at midnight. Occasionally it seemed wiser to keep her up later to tire her. In reality it only meant starting at eleven and finishing at two, so we tried it seldom. There were no days off: seven nights each week, three hours each night, like clockwork.

And being down, we decided we might as well give ourselves a swift kick: cleft palate surgery. There was no mad rush, but we’d already booked it one month after our daughter’s homecoming. Now we wouldn’t only have an inconsolable child unable to receive comfort, we would have an inconsolable child in physical pain unable to receive comfort…

 

So begins Chapter Three.

If I happen to be unavailable for thinking and writing on a particular week (and I’m not available this week because my parents have just arrived from Chicago for a visit!), I might stick in a short book excerpt from time to time rather than leave this space un-updated.

Hope you enjoyed it. 🙂